A Terrible Joy
by The Rebellious Observer
Summary: “He is happy, happier than he’s ever been. He knows this. He knows this.” MalesPercy, OliverPercy slash. Rated for slight explicitness.


**Title:** A Terrible Joy  
**Rating:** R  
**Pairings:** Male OC's/Percy, Oliver/Percy  
**Summary:** "He is happy, happier than he's ever been. He knows this. He knows this." Males/Percy, Oliver/Percy slash. Rated for slight explicitness.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own Harry Potter. If I did, I would make him wear a little plaid skirt.

* * *

Percy is happy.

He is a high-ranking Ministry official with nowhere to go but up; he is young, healthy—relatively good-looking, if what Penelope used to tell him is anything to go by.

His work is meticulous and he has ordered everything around him with immaculate precision and patience.

He has many acquaintances.

He is happy, happier than he's ever been. He knows this. He knows this.

Percy is happy. Except…

On his off-hours—of which there are few—he sits at home; makes himself a quiet dinner; reads.

Sometimes he listens to the radio.

Sometimes he goes to dingy, anonymous bars and lets dingy, anonymous men fuck him into grimy alley walls that smell like muck.

Percy is so happy he feels like bursting out of his skin, like a firecracker: he wants to explode. His skin will fragment and combust and he will fly up, up, and away.

He doesn't know what he would do after that, if it actually ever happened. But it won't, so he won't think about it. Percy is not prone to impractical thoughts.

Percy is really very happy. He knows this. But sometimes he—

The first time Percy was fucked, it was in a cheap rented room with cracks on the grey plaster ceiling.

He was drunk, and gave himself to a sleazy-looking muggle that looked like Snape and reeked of melancholy and flat beer.

He remembers bleeding; they hadn't used enough lubrication, and Percy was so tight, so tight, the man had said.

A flaccid condom full of spunk and tinged a pale, sweet pink had been thrown into the trash and Percy had pulled up his pants and felt old and ugly. He'd never learned the man's name.

Percy is so fucking happy he can't stand it. He can barely breathe. He is turning blue.

On Monday on his lunch break he went to buy some parchment-paper and bumped into Fred on the street.

Fred had shouted at him—made a scene, a spectacle of them both when he knew there was nothing Percy hated more—and even bloodied his nose a little bit before leaving him, embarrassed and alone, in front of their audience.

He can't even go out to get some stupid sheaths of _paper_ without being plagued by his past. The activity has been ruined for him forever.

Percy had thought: _I love—I used to love you,_ and imagined punching Fred square in the face, his fist buried to the wrist.

He clenched and unclenched his trembling, impotent hands and cleaned his face; repaired his broken nose. The spells were thick and clumsy in his mouth.

He will order things he needs by Floo.

On Monday night against a wall in the alley behind a bar, Percy presses back against a stranger and says, "_Harder, harder, harder, harder,_ I can take it." He certainly can.

Percy has worked so hard to be happy—happier—so that's what he is. Anything else would be intolerable.

Percy would die if he thought he weren't: if all his sacrifices had been for nothing.

When Percy sees Oliver again for the first time since graduation, a young, cocky man is trying to get into his pants and Percy isn't yet drunk enough to let him. Maybe after some more whiskey.

Oliver is slumped over in a corner booth and despondently nursing a bottle of booze, and the alcohol fumes and shared misery make Percy brave enough to go sit down with him.

"My girlfriend dumped me. I went here so I could get smashed and not be recognized," slurs Oliver sometime later, after pleasantries and other pretenses have been dispatched.

They get staggeringly drunk together, and Oliver takes Percy home and sleeps with him.

He is too gentle, too cautiously slow, and Percy does not enjoy himself.

Percy is not a delicate and beautiful thing that might be broken, and Oliver shouldn't treat him as if he were.

He can take more. He _has_ taken more.

Oliver falls asleep right after and Percy cleans ejaculate off himself and lurches to the Floo, his clothes buttoned crookedly and stinking of second-hand smoke; he is careful to enunciate every word of his apartment-room.

He turns Oliver over on his stomach, though, before he goes; just in case.

He drinks three glasses of water before he goes to bed and dreams of an endless void; of being devoured.

When Oliver tries to contact him the next day, Percy is mortified.

He prefers to forget those sort of encounters ever happened; they are not acknowledged in his regular life. They can't be.

Percy is happy, and that means he does not do that sort of thing. Happy people do not do the kind of things Percy does; he is not himself when they happen—not really.

Oliver is disrupting Percy's perfect ordered life where the two parallel parts of him never meet, and Percy doesn't like it, not one bit.

After Oliver has tried to fire-chat with him for the third time, Percy says, "Listen, it was just one night. Let's just pretend it never happened, alright?"

And Oliver says, "I know, I know, I'm just sorry, okay? I shouldn't have taken advantage of you like that. I was just—I was so drunk. I'm sorry."

"You think _you_ took advantage of _me_?" asks Percy incredulously, looking at Oliver's sad, sober face, and throws his head back and laughs and laughs and laughs until tears stream down his cheeks in two glittering twin smears.


End file.
